The struggles of an artist’s life are revealed in Director Ira Sachs’ biographical drama, Peter Hujar’s Day.

Based on the book by Linda Rosenkrantz, Sachs’ film invites audiences into a single day in 1974 when she and groundbreaking queer photographer Peter Hujar engaged in a freewheeling, intimate conversation where he shared vivid stories of his interactions with literary and cultural icons like William Burroughs, Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg, while also reflecting on the rhythms of everyday life in 1970s New York.

On November 4 after the DGA membership screening in New York, Sachs discussed the making of Peter Hujar’s Day during a Q&A moderated by Director Bette Gordon (The Drowning).

During the conversation, Sachs noted how a technique he saw in documentaries enabled him to envision the film he wanted to make.

“I had this idea that I was going to shoot the movie in real time meaning it was going to be an hour and a half and I realized that this was a disaster and there was absolutely no way to motivate movement. Why would they move? They were talking to each other across the table. I sort of thought I'd get around that problem but suddenly I had no answer to how to move through time. I had about three or four weeks of being up all night until I saw this film called My Girlfriend’s Wedding by Jim McBride — which like a movie like Poor Little Rich Girl, which is Andy Warhol with Edie Sedgwick and Portrait of Jason, Shirley Clark with with Jason Holliday — films that were very personally made portrait films. I saw the way they used the cut to move through time. It seems like a really obvious thing that the cut is there for you, but it took me weeks to trust that the cut would work. And in those weeks, I actually shot the location with stand ins in very many different times and suddenly I had a list of photographs, and I thought, ‘Ohh, that's the film! I just have to trust that cut.’”

Sachs’ other directorial credits include the feature films Passages, Frankie, Little Men, Love Is Strange, Keep the Lights On, Married Life, Forty Shades of Blue, The Delta, Vaudeville and Boy-Girl, Boy-Girl. He has been a DGA member since 2006 and has served on the Eastern Directors Council.